Catch up time

Well it’s catch up time. Not in the sense that I have training to catch up on, but it’s time to bring my blog up to date with things, and spend a little time working on the website.

Where to begin? Well Ironman Arizona was a great success. It wasn’t a perfect race, but it was pretty darn close. I won’t go into to much detail about the race in my blog – I’ll save that for the race report section of my site, which is coming soon – but I bettered my time from IMWI by about 40 minutes. Normally I’d say that’s equal to a 25-30 minute improvement, but we had some pretty crazy winds out there on the bike, and I had a flat so I’ll call it an even 40 minute improvement!

That performance earned me a spot at Ironman Hawaii, which has been my driving goal for the last two years. What my next goal is/will be/should be is a blog in and of itselef. Mary and I are thrilled at the prospect of going to Hawaii in October.

A wrinkle introduced by qualifying is the fact that I have registered for Ironman Wisconsin, only 5 weeks before Kona. That’s a mighty tight recovery window; and while I seem to be recovering very quickly from Arizona, who knows how I will recover from Wisconsin. In addition to that, who knows how my performance at Wisconsin might influence my motivation for the last 5 weeks leading up to Kona. Mary and I talked about it a bit tonight, and she and I agree that it’s probably better to approach Wisconsin as a giant catered training day. I’m going to start the race, do the swim, the bike, and the first 6 miles of the run and end the day with my first DNF. The thought of that doesn’t make me real happy, but Kona is much more important then Wisconsin at this point.

In another first I found out my hometown newspapers featured articles about my race last week! I feel pretty honored to get mentioned in the newspaper. Here is a link to the article I found – Rochester Post-Bulletin. My dad told me there was also an article in the Austin Daily Herald, but I couldn’t find an online version of it.

The remainder of our trip was great – it was mostly a driving trip around Arizona, with a stop at Sedona, Meteor Crater, and the Grand Canyon. We hiked (two days after IMAZ) down to the bottom, camped out, and hiked back up to the top. The trip was a blast. You can take a look at some of our pictures here.

Training wise, last week was mostly 0’s – if you don’t count the hiking – this week I am limited to swimming since my bike got misdirected to Oregon on the way back and won’t be here until this weekend, no running planned until next week probably. I swam for about 50 minutes today:

3×300 – Swim/Kick/Swim

10×50 @ 1 drill

8×50 @ 1 Non Free

3×300 @ 4:30

Not to much on the plate except for getting back into the swing of things, and preparing for the DeSoto American Triple-T in a few weeks.